This invention relates to a method and apparatus for providing custom cost accounting billing and invoicing to facilitate business transactions.
Many business transactions require the steps of billing and invoicing. For example, in a typical business transaction, a seller of products and/or services sends an invoice to the purchaser of the products and/or services. The purchaser receives the invoice, charges or bills the amount to the appropriate account or accounts, and pays the amount on the invoice to complete the business transaction. Very often, both the seller and the purchaser are large business entities that involve multiple branches, employees, departments and business accounts. Thus, to aid the processing of business transactions, many of these billing and invoicing are performed electronically with various software and computer systems.
Even with sophisticated billing and accounting systems, the billing and invoicing involved in transactions is still complex. For example, multiple services and/or products may be involved in the same transaction, and one business entity may be involved in numerous transactions at the same time. Different types of transactions, services, or products may be charged to various different accounts or deducted from different budgets. In addition, the party receiving the invoice may also need to associate various other proprietary information to the items in the invoice, since such information may be important and essential for the invoice receiving party to complete the business transaction. For example, the party receiving the invoice may want to associate information regarding departments, managers, divisions, budgets or events with each item in the invoice.
Because of the complexity of both the transactions and the billing and accounting systems, a party receiving invoices must often further process the data in the invoices before appropriate accounts can be charged and the invoices can be paid. Typically, after a party receives an invoice, the party must first go through each item of the invoice and determine which account should be associated with a particular item in the invoice. Because each party has its custom proprietary computer systems, the party receiving the invoice must specify the account information in its own computer systems before the invoice can be processed. This may typically involve the party manually entering the invoice data into its system and associating specific items on the invoice with specific accounts. This additional processing significantly increases the workload and time required to process each invoice, and hence detrimentally affects the efficiency of business transactions, especially for large transactions and/or recurring transactions.
Therefore, there is a need to allow an invoice receiving party to customize the invoicing process such that the necessary proprietary information associated with an invoice is available automatically without the need for any of the above additional processing.